Why Everyone Picks a Side (And Why You Shouldn’t); Your Brain Sorts The World Into Us And Them

Join My Substack for more content: maaponte.substack.com

Consulting/Advisory Services: MAAponte.com

📲 Let’s connect on social media (Linktree): https://linktr.ee/thinking2think

🎧 Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to join our growing community of thoughtful individuals!

Most people think they’re thinking independently.

They’re not.

They’re picking a side.

In this episode of Thinking 2 Think, M.A. Aponte breaks down the psychology of tribal thinking—why your brain is wired to divide the world into “us vs them,” how media and algorithms exploit that instinct, and why people today hate each other more than they actually disagree.

This isn’t theory. It’s personal.

After the assassination of two NYPD officers in 2014, Aponte shares how his own thinking changed—how fear and identity reshaped how he saw the world, and what it cost him.

You’ll learn:

• Why your brain automatically forms teams
• The truth about political polarization (it’s not what you think)
• How algorithms amplify division for profit
• What “affective polarization” really means
• How to think clearly without losing your humanity

If you want to think independently, communicate better, and avoid being controlled by group identity, this episode gives you the framework.

Please subscribe, ring that bell if you're listening on YouTube or some other platform that doesn't let you know when a new episode drops.

Transcript

A Cop’s Story Of Tribal Rage

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm going to share something personal that um pertains to the topic of why everyone picks a side. And this is probably the first time I actually spoke about this out loud. December 20th, 2014, five days before Christmas, two officers, later honorary detectives, Officer Rafael Ramos and Wei Jin Lu, were sitting in their patrol car in Bedford Stylus in Brooklyn, just having lunch. A man walked up to the passenger window and executed them both. Shot them in the head through the glass. Then he ran into the subway and killed himself. Ramos had just turned 40. He'd been a school safety officer before joining the NYPD. Being a cop was his lifelong dream and was killed one hour before he was being admitted to the chaplain corp, which is similar to like a priest or a pastor in a church, but for law enforcement and military. Lou had gotten married two months earlier. Two months. His widow later had their daughter through IBF, so their child could exist. That's the kind of loss we're talking about. They're only crying, wearing a law enforcement uniform. I didn't know them personally, but my sergeants did. And when the news hit our precinct, which was within seconds, it was like a bomb went off. Not a physical bomb, a psychological one. Because this had hadn't happened since the 1980s. Police officers assassinated. Not in a shootout, not in a chase, not even in a car stop. Murdered while eating lunch for wearing the uniform. And I need to tell you what happened to me. Because this is the part I'm not proud of. And it's the reason I'm doing this episode. At the rainwater were killed, I changed. The fear and the rage rewired my brain in real time. I became aggressive on the street. I didn't let anyone get close to me or my partner. If you weren't wearing blue, if you weren't one of us, I didn't trust you. Civilians I had sworn to protect became potential threats in my eyes. I treated people I was supposed to serve with suspicion and hostility. Not because they'd done anything wrong, because they were them, and I was us. Looking back, I regret how I treated some civilians deeply, and I still remember them. Because what happened to me wasn't a character failure. It was biology. My brain did exactly what it was designed to do when it feels under attack. It sorted the world into my team and everyone else, blue versus not blue. And for weeks, that sorting controlled my decisions, my behavior, and my relationships. I'm telling you this because the same thing is happening to millions of people right now. Not on the streets of Brooklyn, in their living rooms, on their phones. The war with Iran has split America into teams, pro-war and anti-war. And within each team, the members are getting more hostile, more certain, and more willing to treat the other side as less than human with every passing day. Not because they're bad people, because their brains are doing exactly what mine did in December 2014. Sorting, defending, attacking anything that isn't us. Today I'm going to show you why your brain does this, who's taking advantage of it, and how to hold positions without losing yourself in the process. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as M.A. Aponte, and this is thinking to think before we begin, please, would really be wonderful. It costs you nothing, but it helps me tremendously. And that is if you can like and subscribe, maybe even share, I would really appreciate it. Now onto the episode. In the 1970s, a psychologist named Henry Tajfell ran an experiment that changed how we understand human nature. He took total strangers, people who had never met, and split them into groups based on something completely meaningless. In one version, he showed them paintings by two different artists and put them on Team Klee or Team Kendesky. And that could be butchering some of the names. Some of you that are long-term listeners know that I'm not great with names, but let's move on. Based on which paintings they liked, in another version, he literally just flipped the coin. And here's what happened. So we got Team Klee or Team Kendensky. Within minutes, group members started favoring their own team. They gave more resources to their group. They rated their own team's members as more trustworthy, smarter, and more likable. And they did this knowing the groups were random, knowing there was nothing real connecting them. Researchers call this the minimum group paradigm, meaning it takes the absolute minimum amount of grouping to trigger tribal behavior. It's one of those most repeated findings in psychology, confirmed hundreds of times, and it tells us something uncomfortable. Your brain doesn't need a reason to form a team, it just needs a label. Once you have a label, Democrat, Republican, pro-war, anti-war, blue, red, civilian, anything, your brain automatically starts playing favorites with your group and getting suspicious of the other one. This is what happened to me after Ramos and Lou. The label blue became my whole world. And blue not as the political, but the uh officer blue. My whole world, everything else. I was I was a thinker, an educator at heart, a person who believed in serving people, got uh compressed, excuse me, into one team identity, cop versus everyone else. The label ate everything. And here's the finding that should scare every American, or just human for that matter. Political scientist Liliana Mason at the University of Maryland found that Americans have haven't actually become that much more divided on the issues. On most actually, policy questions, healthcare, immigration, education, even gun control, the average positions of Democrats and Republicans are closer than the media makes it seem. What has changed by a lot is how much we dislike the other side. Researcher calls this uh effective polarization. Effective meaning emotional. So it's emotional hostility toward the other party that goes way beyond disagreeing on policy. As Mason puts it, we've become only a little more divided on actual issues, but dramatically more hostile toward the people on the other side. We don't just disagree anymore, we despise. And this emotional hostility bleeds into everything. Research in the journal PNAS Nexus found that it shapes choices that seem to have nothing to do with politics. What car you buy, whether you wear a mask, what brands you support, who you go on a date with, who you'll hire. Your political team isn't just shaping your politics, it's shaping your entire life. And you might not even notice it's happening. And here's the kicker. We exaggerate how much the other side hates us. Studies consistently show that Democrats think Republicans despise them more than the Republicans actually do. And the other way around, we're fighting a ghost, a cartoon version of the other side that lives in our heads, not in reality. But the cartoon feels real, that it drives real hostility and does real damage to real relationships. If tribal psychology is the fuel, social media is the gasoline. And here's why. Your brain is wired to pay more attention to threats than to safety. Negative content gets a stronger reaction from you than a positive content, such as this one. Content that makes you outraged, scared, or disgusted keeps you scrolling longer than content that makes you think or feel at peace and social media algorithms. The computer programs that decide what shows up in your feed are built to maximize how long you stay on the platform, which means they are designed to feed you content that fires up your tribal instincts. And this is why it's so important to please share this type of content. Please, because it's not just about what I'm saying, it's about the context and saving our society from this huge divide that's occurring. The results is an outrage machine that sorts you into a team, feeds you a never-ending stream of the other team at its absolute worst, and then rewards you with likes and shares when you attack them. Every platform, left, right, and center, is running this exact machine. It's not a conspiracy, it's a business model. Outrage is profitable, careful thinking is not. This is why when you're an extreme left or your extreme light, uh excuse me, right, you have more views, more likes, more shares. Research uh actually shows that being exposed to opposing views on social media can make you more divided, not less, because the algorithm doesn't show you the thoughtful, reasonable version of the other side. It shows you the most extreme, most outrageous version, which confirms every bad thing your tribal brain already believed about them. So you're not choosing to be tribal, you're being sorted into tribes by system designed to make money off your division. You're going along with it willingly because it feels good. Belonging feels good. Having an enemy feels clarifying, being certain feels safe. Your brain rewards all three, and the algorithms know it. And let me show you exactly how tribal psychology is playing out right now in the Iran war uh debate. Because if you can see the pattern, you can step outside of it. Team one, we had no choice. This team believes the strikes were necessary, justified, and long overdue. They point to Iran's nuclear program and supports for armed groups in other countries, its government's brutality toward its own people, and the failure of decades of talking. Within this team, questioning the war is seen as weakness, being naive or being anti-American. If you express doubt, you're told you want Iran to have nukes, as if having questions means you support the enemy. The team's effort to hold patriotism as a membership badge. Support the war equals support the troops equal love America. Question the war equals betray the troops equal hate America. There's no room for gray area. You're either with us or you're against us. Team two, this is a war crime. This team believes the strikes were illegal, unjustified, and driven by political interests rather than real security concerns. They point to the history of American meddling in the Middle East, the questionable intelligence, the human cost, and the failure to finish the negotiation. Within this team, supporting the war is seen as bloodlust ignorance or blind obedience. If you express support, you're told you're okay with killing children. As if supporting the strikes mean you endorse every consequence. The team's enforcement tool, morality as a membership badge, opposes the war, which equals care about human life, equals be a good person. Support the war equals don't care about deaths, equal be a monster. Same either or structure, different team jersey. What both teams have in common? Here's what the clear thinker notices. Both teams are running the exact same playbook. Both take a complicated issue and crush it into simple either or. Both use moral shaming to keep members in line. Both treat disagreement within the group as betrayal. And both have turned the other side into cartoon villains, turning fellow citizens into character caricatures instead of people. Remember Mason's research, the actual disagreement between these groups are smaller than you think. Many people in team 1 genuinely worry about civilian casualties. Many people in team two acknowledge that Iran's Nicolas was a real threat, but the team structure won't let them say those things out loud because saying something nuanced gets you kicked out of the team. And that is the real danger. Not that people disagree. Disagreement is healthy and normal. The danger is that the team structure punishes thinking. It rewards loyalty and punishes curiosity. It rewards certainty and punishes honest doubts. The moment you have to choose between intellectual honesty and keeping your seat at the table, tribal psychology has won. Here's where it gets personal. And I want you to really look at yourself during this section, this next piece. Remember what we talked about in the previous episode. Identity protective cognition, where your brain treats a challenge to your beliefs the same way it treats a physical threat. The same thing happens with the group identity, not just personal beliefs. This is exactly what happened to me in December 2014. Began a cop wasn't my job. It became my entire identity. And when the identity was threatened by the assassination, I couldn't process it as a complex event with multiple causes. I could only process in the terms of teams, us versus them. I see this at my school all the time. A parent doesn't just disagree with the policy, they become the parent who fights the school. A teacher doesn't just have a different teaching style, they become the difficult one. Once the label sticks, every interaction after that gets filtered through it. The actual person disappears behind the teen badge. So the fix belonging to more than one group. How do we research points to one of the most powerful cures for tribal thinking, belonging to multiple groups that overlap with people from the other side. Researchers call this cross-cutting identities. The concept is simple but powerful. The more identities you hold that connect you to people and other teams, the harder it is to treat those people as less than human. Think about it. If the only thing that defines you is conservative or liberal, then everyone on the other side is a stranger. But if you also a parent, a veteran, a basketball fan, a church member, a guitar player, a gamer, a dog person, a small business owner, those identities build bridges to people who might vote differently than you, but share your love of dogs, your faith, your hustle, or your service. The problem in modern America is that our identities have collapsed onto one axis. Decades ago, you could be a Democrat who went to church, hunted, and lived in a rural area, or Republican who supported unions, cared about the environment, and lived in a city. Overlapping identities were very common. Today our political, religious, geographical, culture, cultural, and media identities have all lined up into two mega teams with almost no overlap. And that alignment is what makes the emotional hostility, the effective polarization, so intense. So the personal move, actively build relationships in the activities that cross team lines. Join a group where politics doesn't matter: a gym, a book club, a volunteer crew, sports league. Build friendships with people you never run into in your political and media world. Not to change their minds, just to remember that they're human. Because the moment you genuinely know someone on the other side, it becomes much harder to see them as a monster. And I want to share something from my army experience that matters here. When I was going through training between 2001 and 2006, the military was one of the most mixed environments I've ever been in. People from every background, every race, every political view, every part of the country, all wearing the same uniform, all working toward the same mission. Your team wasn't Democrat or Republican, your team was your unit. Now, it wasn't perfect. I experienced direct racism during my service. My rifle was sabotaged. I was called a slur to my face. I'm not pretending the military is some ideal world, but what I am saying is that the structure forced those overlapping identities. You had to work with people who are nothing like you. And in that forced closeness, you found shared humanity that the normal sorting of civilian life would never have allowed. That experience gave me something that's priceless ever since. The ability to see the person behind the position. To disagree with someone, ideas without throwing away their humanity, it's a skill. It has to be practiced. And right now, in the middle of a war and the election season in a divided nation, it's the skill that matters the most. So how do you participate in the world? Have opinions, take stands, care deeply about issues without falling into the tribal trap? Here's the framework I use. Rule one your opinion is a working guess, not who you are. Scientists call it a hypothesis, a conclusion based on the best evidence you have right now that can be updated when new evidence shows up. An identity can't be updated. It can only be defended. If you catch yourself saying I'm a fill-in-the-blank person about a political position, you cross from working guest to identity. Catch it, pull back, return to based on what I know right now, I believe, fill in the blank. I'm open to changing if the evidence changes. This is how scientists think. This is how the best investors think. This is how the best NYPD officers think. Every read of a situation is temporary until more information comes in. The moment you lock in, you stop seeing what's actually in front of you and start seeing only what proves you're right. And this is what even doctors do when they're prescribing medications or they're going to give you a treatment. It's their best hypothesis at the moment. Rule two, disagree with the idea, not the person. The second you start thinking people who support this war are monsters, or people who oppose this war are traitors or voted differently than you, you stopped thinking and started sorting into teams. The person across from you is not their opinion, they're a human being with a complicated inner life. Who got to where they are through a path you probably don't fully understand. I learned this the hard way after Ramos and Lou. The civilians I treated with hostility weren't my enemies. They were people walking home from work, picking up groceries, living their lives. My tribal brain couldn't see that. It took me weeks to come back to reality. And by then, I've already done damage I can't undo. Rule three, read the other side with curiosity, not disgust. Once a week, deliberately look at the media from the other side, not to hate read, not to collect ammo for your next argument, but to genuinely ask, what are they seeing that I'm not? What's the strongest version of their case? Now, research shows that just exposing yourself to the other side views can actually make you more divided to you go in with the content. The key is your attitude. If you approach it thinking, let me see what these idiots are saying, it backfires. If you approach it thinking, let me understand the best version of this perspective, it opens you up. Here's the fascinating finding. Researchers at Yale found that people who are high in what they call science curiosity, not how much science they know, but how genuinely curious they are about things they understand are significantly less tribal than their peers. Even at the same level of education, the thing that protects you from tribalism isn't how much you know. It's how interested you are in what you don't know. Curiosity is the antidote to tribalism. Rule four, be more than your politics. Actively hold on to identities that have nothing to do with the current events. Be a parent, be an athlete, be a musician, be a volunteer, be a mentor, be a student of something that has zero connection to the news. The more identities you carry, the harder it is for any single one to swallow you whole. At my school, I push students to build identities around skills, interests, and relationships, not around opinions. Because a kid who sees herself or himself as a scientist also plays basketball and loves their grandmother, that's strong. A kid who sees themselves as uh the girl, the boy who hates the other side is fragile. Same goes for adults. Rule five, practice both and instead of either or. Every time you catch yourself thinking in either or terms, either the war is right or it's a crime, force yourself to use both and instead. The war may have been both a response to a real threat and an unavoidable choice. Iran's government is both brutal to its own people and a victim of decades of outside interference. The protesters are both patriotic and potentially wrong about some things. Both and doesn't mean both sides are equally right. It means real life is complicated enough to hold multiple truths at the same time. And your brain is smart enough to hold them if you refuse to let them, excuse me, let team pressure crush them into a single simple story. Here's what I want you to do this week. Write down every group you identify with. Political party, religion, jobs, sports team, community, family role, hobby, school, neighborhood, all of them. Now circle the ones that overlap with people who are different from you politically. Those are the cross-cutting identities, the bridges between you and people who think differently. If you have fewer than three circles, you're vulnerable to being captured by one team. Deliberately invest in what those bridge identities this week. Pick one person on the other side of the war debate. Someone who actually knows, not on social media stranger, ask them one question. Don't correct, just hear them. And for one week, before you form an opinion about anything in the news, pause and ask, Am I looking at the evidence or am I checking with my team thinks first? Be honest with yourself. The answer might surprise you. And finally, practice both and three times this week, out loud, in real conversations. I think both X and Y can be true at the same time. Watch how it changes the energy in the room. Here's what we covered today. We learned that picking teams isn't a character flaw. It's a built-in feature of the human brain that kept our ancestors alive. We learned that Americans haven't actually become that much more divided on the actual issues, but we've become dramatically more hostile toward people on the other side, what researchers call effective polarization. And the hostility is being manufactured for profit by algorithms and media companies. We looked at how both the pro and anti-war camps use identity, excuse me, identical team enforcement structures. And I shared my own experience of how tribal thinking took over my brain personally after the Ramos Liu assassination and what it cost me. We learned the antidotes. Treat your opinions as working guesses, not identities, disagree with ideas, not people, read the other side with curiosity, build identities that cross team lines, what researchers call cross-cutting identities, and practice both and thinking. The tribal audit worksheet and both and practice guide are free on my Substack at maaponti.substack.com. Link is in the podcast notes and description. The complete series toolkit, clear protocol, hold protocol, radar method, shift method, and the tribal audit is available to paid subscribers as a bundle download. If this series has changed how you think, even a little, consider sharing at least with one person. Let them know we are more connected than we are divided if we just acknowledge these things. And also, I'm creating a Udemy course, so stay tuned for that. It will be available. Just subscribe to the Substack as well as Think Into Think podcast. And I will be making those announcements on both those. Next week, this the next episode, we are going to be going over the 24-hour rule. Why your first reaction is almost always wrong. This is the episode where I'm going to tie every framework from this, from these last few episodes together in one master principle. The clear protocol, the hold protocol, the radar method, the ship method, the tribe audit, it all connect to one idea that I've carried from the Army to the NYPD to Wall Street to the classroom. And it's the same five words my sergeant said to me on October 23rd, 2014, when he put me in that car instead of letting me run toward the sound of a 1013. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You don't want to miss this one. Please subscribe, ring that bell if you're listening on YouTube or some other platform that doesn't let you know when a new episode drops. Until then, hold your positions loosely. Hold your humanity tightly and keep thinking. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as MA Aponte, and this is Thinking to Think.